Southwest Power Pool (SPP) is moving forward with its proposed Expedited Resource Adequacy Study (ERAS) after receiving all of its needed internal approvals and expects to have it submitted to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) later this month for a final decision.

Steve Purdy, SPP’s technical director of engineering, told NPM that the new ERAS proposal began back in September 2024 through the Real Team Stakeholder Working Group. The ERAS proposal contains a specialized study process that is time limited with a single opportunity for customers to request interconnection for new projects.

These projects must be selected by SPP’s load responsible entities (LREs) such as utilities and co-operatives to serve their capacity needs and will be limited to how much can be placed in the study depending on the load projections given for the 2030 planning year, as well as the planning reserve margin (PRM) that SPP requires. The gap between that and how much capacity is projected to be available in the 2030 timeframe will determine how much can be entered into ERAS.

Purdy said that SPP will not be reviewing projects submitted into ERAS other than to make sure they meet the eligibility requirements in the tariff, which requires them to put up money and site control. Otherwise, it is up to the LREs to decide what meets their needs.

Based on information that SPP has today, which is likely to change, it is estimated that about 21 GW will be the maximum entered into the ERAS study process. That is about half of the size seen in recent years in SPP’s clusters and about a fifth of what was seen in SPP’s most recent cluster.

“We’ve had a long-standing backlog in our GI queue, though we are about to clear that out and expect that to happen at the end of this year,” Prudy said. “It’s been going on for quite some time, which has made it difficult for customers to plan generation and not been able to bring things online in that timeframe that they wanted.”

Combined with the queue backlog has been the expansion of capacity needs showing up in utilities’ regular load forecasts, as well as larger block loads specific to large data centers. Purdy added that there has also been an increase in oil and gas activity.

Purdy explained that these things have put its customers, particularly load responsible entities like utilities, behind the curve and behind their PRM.

Making it harder to catch up is an increased PRM, which SPP announced earlier this year. The PRM was raised due to the extreme weather seen over the past five years. SPP raised the summer PRM for the 2030 timeframe, increasing it from 17% to 12%. More significantly is the new winter PRM, which didn’t exist before, and is around 30%. Purdy said that utilities have already been looking for projects to meet these requirements, with many projects in the planning or study stages, or in development, with others trying to plan around the new PRM and navigate the GI process with its backlog.

Addressing the backlog, Purdy said that SPP expects all the prior clusters to the current one to be through to the GIA stage by the end of 2025 with the current cluster to kick off the study around December 1 and to finish this year.

“They’re almost caught up,” he said, explaining that this was done through raising “the bar on what is required to get into the study process, shortened timeframes with engaging additional consultants to do certain things in parallel, and employed certain technology to automate part of the process.”

ERAS

Though the ERAS process began in September 2024, Purdy said that SPP put forward a couple options and the work group said, “go big.”

“So, we came back with a bigger proposal in the December timeframe and really started putting pen to paper and putting out the actual tariff language,” he said.

The proposal calls for projects that can reach COD within five years of executing a generation interconnection agreement (GIA) and is a one-time process run separately from SPP’s standard GI queue. Projects up for consideration in SPP’s most recent GI study cluster will also be given the chance to transfer to the ERAS queue instead.

Other regional transmission organizations (RTOs) have also put forward proposals similar to the ERAS proposal, including MISO and PJM. Purdy said that SPP worked closely with MISO as they developed their proposal for a couple reasons: efficiency and with the hope that if a similar process was brought to FERC, then it would be a smooth approval process.

“But MISO ended up going in a slightly different direction than we did in that ours is a one-time study, a single cluster study and that will be the end of it,” Purdy said, adding that MISO’s queue is a “little more backed up” than SPP’s and they have staged their ERAS proposal with a longer timeframe until certain milestones in their queue-clearing efforts are reached. Also, PJM’s ERAS proposal is more of a single opportunity but moves requests already in the study process ahead to their new process, “so from that standpoint, it’s a little bit different in that they are advancing” the later stage process whereas SPP is keeping the ERAS study separate to run parallel with its cluster study.

As projects move through the new ERAS queue, any other request in the regular process will essentially be ignored, according to Purdy, so that they won’t be competing with other requests and won’t see high upgrade costs that typically accrue to the clusters.

“So, we don’t expect there to be a lot of turnover in the requests and subsequent restudies so we should be able to complete it relatively quickly and get to a bottom-line cost more quickly than we would for the regular process,” he said.

PJM recently selected 51 projects for its own proposal, the Reliability Resource Initiative (RRI), of which a lion’s share of the projects were natural gas, and mostly uprates or expansion of existing natural gas projects.

Within SPP, there are 65 pre-operational natural gas projects in the queue led by two 1,300 MW proposals submitted in the service territories of Oklahoma Gas & Electric Company and Southwestern Public Service Company, respectively, according to NPM queue data.

Timeline

Having gained approval from SPP’s Board of directors earlier this week, the proposal will head to FERC in one to two weeks. Once there, it will kick off the usual 60-day timeframe.

Purdy said that he expects protests to be filed that may extend that timeframe somewhat.

He explained that, along the way, certain stakeholders or customers have been consistent in expressing concerns that customers in the existing GI queue could be disadvantaged by the ERAS process and could see cost shifts not only to GI customers but to load.

“I know there has been a lot of concern and apprehension in the developer community, which have not fallen on deaf ears,” Purdy said. “I don’t think there will no harm, there may be some individual situations that may be harmed, but we’ve taken reasonable steps to try to minimize that. We really have said all along that this is a bridge, a stopgap measure and think the consolidated planning process we are working on is the long-term answer.”

Purdy said that once SPP has its consolidated planning process in place, the problems seen in getting generation to market will be greatly reduced and eliminated.

If approved by FERC, the ERAS process itself is estimated to take anywhere from three to six months.